Reflections from the Chair

I must say up front that I am very lucky and grateful to be associated with such a great group of colleagues, students, and alumni. All have contributed to make my first year as chair of the department fun, interesting, and rewarding. As noted in the last newsletter, a highlight of the fall semester was the Bernard Lecture and banquet featuring Professor Keith Devlin. We look forward to next year’s event with Professor Joe Gallian from the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Look for details in the Events section of this newsletter.

          Many things have occupied my time: helping students get into full sections, trying to stay within budget, and watching the piles of paperwork in my office get dangerously tall. As a department, we shared many noteworthy events, and here I share a few highlights from my vantage point.

          Once every several years each department at Davidson College undertakes an external review and the Department of Mathematics’ turn was this past year. In January we welcomed Professor Karen Saxe of Macalester College and Professor Edward Burger of Williams College to campus for a three-day visit. While here, they interviewed students, faculty from the department, and various people from around campus. They were a bit perplexed by the lack of snow shovels around campus and a lack of white stuff on the ground. However, they were very complimentary of our program and offered good insights and suggestions for continuing excellence.

          On Friday, April 3, the Department celebrated Professor Tim Chartier’s achievement of tenure and promotion, with champagne and diet coke. It was well deserved and we all look forward to many more years of working together. As Tim and all members of the department will agree, the process is thorough and time-consuming for all involved. During the fall and early spring, letters were written, classes visited, and meetings held. The spring semester brought a series of announcements of his progress through the system as first the Departmental Tenure Committee, then the Faculty Tenure Committee, and finally the Board of Trustees all recommended his continuous tenure and promotion at Davidson College. Congratulations Tim!

          Professors Rich Neidinger and Mike Mossinghoff will resume regular duties back in the department after their year-long sabbaticals, returning well rested and tanned I’m sure. Look for updates and news from them here and in the fall issue of the review. Professor Stephen Davis will be on sabbatical during the fall 2009 semester. His schedule is already packed and we wish him well on his travels and work.

          The news that Professor Sarah Mason decided to accept a job at Wake Forest University is bittersweet for us. During her two years at Davidson, Sarah became an integral part of the department and community, and we will miss her in many ways. But we share her happiness that she will be working not only in the same city, but even in the same department, as her husband Jason Parsley. We all wish her well and know that our relationship with her will continue.

          At the last faculty meeting of the spring semester, Professor Laurie Heyer was surprised with the announcement that she has received this year’s Matthews Travel Endowment Award. This award, the purpose of which is "to afford opportunities for personal renewal and enjoyment," is given annually to a faculty or staff member in due recognition of the outstanding and unselfish service rendered Davidson by members of the College family. Laurie has received lots of advice and suggestions already so look for details about her travels in a future newsletter.

          We are thrilled that Professors Ben Klein and Rob Whitton will both teach in the department next year. Ben has graciously agreed to help us out by teaching a course in the fall and delaying his full retirement by yet another semester. Rob will teach a full load, and I know that many students will be overjoyed to be able to be a student in one of his classes. Many thanks to you both!

          This year we conducted exit interviews with seniors over lunch at the Commons. Faculty took turns meeting with students in small groups and in addition to the great food at the commons, the conversations were fascinating. Students reflected on their time at Davidson in the Math Department and offered their suggestions to keep our department the great one it is. Look for their plans after graduation at the end of this Bernard Review.

          For the first time since I’ve been at Davidson, the department is planning a retreat. Think of it: nine mathematicians fending for themselves for two nights in the North Carolina mountains. Actually, we’ll be staying in a home in Montreat, but will have to put up with each other’s culinary skills. We will be discussing our curriculum, student experiences, and the upcoming search for a new colleague. Wish us luck!

          Clearly, we’ve had a full year in the department, and after reading on about the activities of our students and faculty you’ll agree that the Department is thriving and share my excitement about the future.

The annual department awards were presented at the spring convocation. Jim Dickson ’09 received the William G. McGavock Mathematics Award. Jim has excelled in explorations beyond the standard curriculum, including research experience ranging from the mathematical modeling of a living computer to permutation enumeration. Mali Zhang ’11 received the William Vinson Mathematics Award and is noted particularly for her enthusiasm, persistent hard work, aptitude for understanding abstract concepts, and precision in computing.

           In February, five teams participated in the international Mathematical Contest in Modeling. The competition poses open-ended applied problems requiring a busy four-day period of research and writing. Three Davidson teams were awarded Meritorious distinction, given to the top 18% of the 1675 competing teams: Greg Marcil ’11, Nathalia Paulinelli ’10, and Thad Sieracki ’09; A.J. Ferguson ’09, Brett Holloway ’10, and Samantha Simpson ’09; and Chelsea Henderson ’09, Miller Williams ’10, and Max Win ’10.

           Ben Altman ’10, a Bryan Scholarship wrestler, was named Southern Conference Student-Athlete of the Week in mid-January. Ben is the only wrestler in the 87-year history of the program at Davidson to be so named. Ben previously won the award in February 2008 and was named to the Academic All-SoCon team in that same season.

Pedagogy

In February, Professor Heyer gave a talk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The talk, entitled Lost and Found: Integrating math and biology in the first-year curriculum, as part of a symposium, Mathematical Biology, the New Frontier: Educating the Next Generation. Mathematical events at the AAAS meeting were highlighted on the AMS web page.   

        A number of students engaged in independent studies and a mathematics seminar during the spring semester. Kristi Muscalino ’09 extended her summer research project with Professor Laurie Heyer on using bacteria to compute cryptographic hash functions, and Will DeLoache ’09, Erich Kreutzer ’10, and Max Win ’10 studied artificial intelligence. Madeline Parra ’09 and Scott Frantz ’09 studied databases and web application design with Professor Stephen Davis. Lindsay Paroczai ’09 and Gabe Mayer ’09 studied mathematical modeling with Professor Molinek, and Gabe presented a Math Coffee on his simulation of highway traffic flow. Professor Sarah Mason led a seminar in combinatorics leading to Math Coffee presentations Tilings: All the math that went into designing your kitchen floor and Chess: the knight’s tour by Nathaniel Hutchinson ’09 and Miller Williams ’10, respectively.

         Professor Rob Whitton’s Exploring Mathematical Ideas (MAT 118) class held its poster session this April. Twenty student projects filled the Lilly Family Gallery, exploring such ideas as the improbability of Joe Dimaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, the expected point value of a three-point shot versus a two-pointer, and the surprising result that the expected value of a run on fourth down is higher than that of a punt.

        Professor Tim Chartier was a nominee for the "Most Entertaining Teacher of the Year" at the Davidson Awards hosted by The Davidson Show. When the votes were tallied, Professor Susan Roberts (Political Science) was dubbed with the distinction, chosen from a list of professors including Professors Larry Cain (Physics), Suzanne Churchill (English), Gil Holland (English), and Doug Ottati (Religion).

Professor Molinek visited Rosemary Klein's 6th grade class at Bailey Middle School to engage daughter Sullivan's classmates in a variety of activities related to the number π. Pi Day occurs on March 14th. (You know why, right?) Since Pi Day occurred on a Saturday, Donna visited the students on the following Monday. The Department also celebrated, on the Friday, with a variety of π-related activities including a Pi-ku contest in which submitted prose or poetry must have five lines with 3, 1, 4, 1, and 5 syllables each. A number of entries were submitted including two poems from the group which travelled to the MAA-SE meeting. The winner was Chelsea Henderson ’09.

         Donna also spoke to the Charlotte Math Club. In particular, Donna used knot theory, a branch of topology, to explain why car sunshades always fold into an odd number of loops. For more information, see the article that inspired the talk, Topology explains why automobile sunshades fold oddly by Curtis Feist and Ramin Naimi in College Mathematics Journal 40 (2009), no. 2, 93-98.

        In May, Charlotte Fox News posed a question to Professor Tim Chartier that led to his appearance on the evening news. In the first quarter of 2009, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department posted a 25% reduction in crime. The news station wondered: if such a reduction continued, when would Charlotte see less than one crime per quarter? The answer appeared as the top story on Fox that evening with a few clips of Tim.

         Tim presented his math and math show Mime-matics at Marcellus Middle School in Marcellus, MI; Kalamazoo Area Mathematics and Science Center in Kalamazoo, MI; Denison University; Kenyon College; and The Pines at Davidson.

Professor Chartier’s paper Searching for text in vector space, co-authored with Nicholas Dovidio (Stanford University; Davidson ’07), appeared in The UMAP Journal as 29 (2008), no. 4, 417-430. The paper derives from Dovidio’s honors thesis. Tim’s paper March madness to movies, co-authored with Amy Langville (College of Charleston) and Peter Simov (North Carolina State University; Davidson ’08) was accepted for publication by Math Horizons.

           Tim presented A pretty mathematical face at Denison University and at an awards banquet at Western Michigan University. In the talk, Tim introduced topics in facial recognition using techniques from linear algebra. At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, D.C., Tim co-organized the session Performing mathematics. In that session, Tim presented two talks: Using mime to see the remainder, and, with Colm Mulcahy (Spelman College), Six fibs and videotape, in which Tim performed a card trick that exploited a fact about Fibonacci numbers.

           Continuing work associated with their calculus textbook, Professors Stephen Davis and Irl Bivens created an exercise correspondence for the 8th and 9th editions of their text.

           Professor Rich Neidinger’s review of the Griewank and Walther’s Evaluating Derviatives: Principles and Techniques of Algorithmic Differentiation appeared in MAA Reviews. Rich also published a letter to the editor, Archimedes, Taylor, and Richardson in Mathematics Magazine’s February 2009 issue. 

         Professor John Swallow presented the invited lecture Circular irrationalities: from Galois to Kummer and back again at the spring MAA-NJ meeting. The talk described John’s work on Galois module structure with colleagues at other institutions as well as former students Andy Schultz (Illinois; Davidson ’02) and Frank Chemotti ’05, who will enter Oregon’s doctoral program in mathematics this fall.

Research

The department’s research activities were well represented at the Joint Mathematical Meetings in Washington D.C. Professor Heyer spoke on her collaborative summer research, delivering Computing a cryptographic hash function with bacteria, and she also presented a poster on the NSF-UBM program Synthetic biology research for undergraduates (SyBR-U) and participated on a panel discussion entitled Primary literature as a hook in applied calculus. Erich Kreutzer ’10 presented the paper How fair are BCS ratings? Analysis of Colley methods for sports ranking. Professor Mossinghoff presented Isodiametric problems for equilateral polygons at a special session on experimental mathematics. Professor Neidinger presented Algorithms for multivariable polynomial interpolation.

Algebra:
         Professor John Swallow’s paper Automatic realizations of Galois groups with cyclic quotient of order pⁿ with Ján Mináč (Western Ontario) and Andrew Schultz (Illinois; Davidson ’02) appeared in the Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux as 20 (2008), 419-430.

Combinatorics:
         Professor Sarah Mason’s article An explicit construction of type A Demazure atoms appeared in Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics as 29 (2009), no. 3, 295-313.

         In February, Sarah presented the talk Quasisymmetric Schur functions and refinements of the Littlewood-Richardson Rule to the Algebra and Combinatorics Seminar at North Carolina State University. Sarah also presented Jeu de taquin: the 15-puzzle at the MAA-SE meeting. In the talk Sarah connected the sliding procedure of the 15-puzzle with a governing behavior of certain classes of polynomials.

         This summer Sarah will supervise the research of Mali Zhang ’11 under the Davidson Research Initiative. The two will analyze questions concerning Scramble Squares, puzzles involving nine 4" by 4" squares. The goal is to place the pieces so that a continuous image appears on each internal edge. You can see an example on Amazon.com. It is interesting to note that the image does not represent a valid solution, reflecting that while very easy to play these puzzles can be quite difficult to solve.

Discrete geometry and number theory:
         Professor Mossinghoff gave the talk Barker sequences and Wieferich cycles at an AMS meeting at the University of Illinois in a special session Number theory in the spirit of Erdös in honor of the prolific Hungarian mathematician. He gave another talk at a number theory conference at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, on an old problem on polynomials: Given a polynomial with integer coefficients, if it’s reducible, how many coefficients do you need to adjust before being guaranteed of finding an irreducible polynomial? Mike also gave several talks in the local number theory seminar at the University of South Carolina, where he has been on sabbatical this year.

         Mike’s article Lower bounds for Z-numbers, written with Lithuanian mathematician Artüras Dubickas, was published in Mathematics of Computation as (2009), 1837-1851. The article tackles a problem in number theory that also involves some dynamical systems. Mike's paper Wieferich pairs and Barker sequences was accepted for publication by Designs, Codes and Cryptography.

Mathematical and computational biology: 
          Professor Heyer met each Friday with Shashank Suresh ’11 and Annie Temmink ’11, through the Bio-Math Connections program, in preparation for summer research in synthetic biology. Mark Trawick ’10 will work on MAGIC Tool software development project this summer.

Numerical analysis and scientific computation:
         Professor Neidinger presented the talk Evaluating derivatives with MATLAB at the MAA-SE meeting, introducing the audience to his library of automated differentiation methods.

         Professor Chartier presented a talk at Western Michigan University on his research in multigrid methods in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory.          

         Tim also worked with several students this year. Nathalia Paulinelli ’10 and Max Win ’10 continued their work in iterative linear solvers, and Jim Dickson ’09 will extend these efforts in his research during the summer. Tim and Erich Kreutzer ’10 continued their analysis of Netflix ratings data with matrix clusters and adaptations of sports ranking methods. In February, Erich and Max turned their attention to sports ranking. Working in collaboration with Amy Langville (College of Charleston) and her students, Tim, Erich, and Max designed and implemented ratings algorithms to predict the outcome of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. The team submitted their predictions to ESPN’s annual basketball bracket-picking challenge. Of the over 4.6 million entries this year, the group produced 3 predictions landing in the top 10%; their best method finished in the top 3% of all submissions. The work generated media interest with two Charlotte Observer articles: Feeling smart on your picks? Bad news and Davidson math whizzes show brackets skills. The Davidson group also appeared on News14 in the story Mathematics meets March Madness at Davidson.

          Tim has also joined the Advisory Board of YourMusicOn (YMO), a mobile music startup company. Paul Ward ’81, vice president of customer experience, said of Tim’s joining, "In college I was split between my love of math and music, and YMO gives me a chance to be in both worlds. The company’s mission is to go beyond normal social network and music recommendation practices, and to advanced analytics to identify and boost what makes music really exciting and interesting to people. Dr. Chartier’s work in non-negative symmetric matrices will help shape our analytics innovation."

Professor Stephen Davis was elected as a Governor of the MAA for 2009-2012, representing the five-state southeastern section of the MAA. He has served previously as Chair and Secretary-Treasurer of the southeastern section and has won its Distinguished Service award.

Professor John Swallow was elected Davidson’s Vice Chair pro tem, the highest faculty office. John’s responsibilities will include representing the Davidson faculty to the administration and the Board of Trustees. President Tom Ross also appointed John to the Implementation Team for the strategic plan. John was also reappointed associate editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society under the new editor, Steven Krantz (Washington University in St. Louis).

          Professor Laurie Heyer has begun a one-year term as past chair of BIO-SIGMAA. Laurie coordinated student activities and organized the graduate school and career fair at the MAA-SE meeting. Laurie also served on the search committee for an interim Director of Campus Ministry at Davidson College Presbyterian Church.

         Professors Irl Bivens and Ben Klein authored, along with contributions from Arthur Holshouser of Charlotte, the NC State Mathematics Contest, held in April at the NC School of Science and Mathematics.

         Math Horizons, the undergraduate mathematics magazine of the Mathematical Association of America, selected Adam Lewicki ’11 to join the Student Advisory Board. Professor Tim Chartier was reappointed to the magazine's Editorial Board.

         Professors Ben Klein and John Swallow also conducted external reviews of departments at other institutions.

Save the date! The 2009-2010 Bernard Lecture is scheduled for September 6, 2009. Professor Joseph Gallian (University of Minnesota, Duluth) will be this year’s lecturer. Joe has published an extensive collection of research and expository articles, has written or edited several books, has served as president of the MAA, and is an award-winning teacher.

A fond farewell to our many Bernard Society members from the class of 2009! Quite a few reported definite plans:

Jim Dickson will begin the Ph.D. program in mathematics at Virginia Tech. Chelsea Henderson will begin the two-year Master of Arts in Teaching program at the University of Georgia. Katie Johnston will join the New York compensation consultancy of Towers Perrin, where she served as a summer intern.

         Tiffany Mumby will begin the M.S. program in accounting at Wake Forest University. Kristi Muscalino will begin a ten-week actuary internship program in Atlanta and will prepare to take her first actuary exam in August. Kittery Neale will be on staff with Campus Outreach at Davidson College.

         Madeline Parra will teach middle school math in Baltimore through the the Teach for America program. Samantha Simpson will be attending medical school either at Ohio State University or the University of Cincinnati. Lisa Zook will begin a Master’s in Public Health at the University of Michigan. The two-year program includes a seven- to eight-month period in a developing country.

Davidson Math on Facebook

         Catch up and network with other Davidson mathematics alumni as part of the FB group Davidson Math Alumni! If you’re interested in mathematically-themed events at Davidson, join the on-campus FB group, Davidson Math, as well. A hearty thanks to Beth DeWitt ’99, graduate student in math at Michigan, for the fabulous idea at her tenth reunion.

Continuing Support

            Thank you for your continuing support of the Richard R. Bernard Society for Mathematics at Davidson College. Your gifts support outside speakers and math coffees, student travel to conferences, and other mathematical events.

            To make a contribution to the society, please specify "Bernard Society" on your check and mail it to the Office of Development, Davidson College, Box 7173, Davidson, NC 28035-7173. Gifts to the Bernard Society are separate from the Annual Fund.